“Some of these stories are closer to my own life than others are, but not one of them is as close as people seem to think.” Alice Murno, from the intro to Moons of Jupiter

"Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see." Arthur Schopenhauer

“Why does everything you know, and everything you’ve learned, confirm you in what you believed before? Whereas in my case, what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away a little and a little, a fragment then a piece and then a piece more. With every month that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of this world: and the next world too. Show me where it says, in the Bible, ‘Purgatory.’ Show me where it says ‘relics, monks, nuns.’ Show me where it says ‘Pope.’” –Thomas Cromwell imagines asking Thomas More—Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Campaigning Deities: Justifying the ways of Satan

Milton believed Christianity more
than worthy of a poetic canon in the tradition of the classical poets, and Paradise Lost represents his effort at
establishing one. What his Christian epic has offered for many readers over the
centuries, however, is an invitation to weigh the actions and motivations of
immortals in mortal terms. In the story, God becomes a human king, albeit one
with superhuman powers, while Satan becomes an upstart subject. As Milton
attempts to “justify the ways of God to Man,” he is taking it upon himself
simultaneously, and inadvertently, to justify the absolute dominion of a human
dictator. One of the consequences of this shift in perspective is the
transformation of a philosophical tradition devoted to parsing the logic of
biblical teachings into something akin to a political campaign between two
rival leaders, each laying out his respective platform alongside a case against
his rival. What was hitherto recondite and academic becomes in Milton’s work
immediate and visceral.

Keats famously penned the wonderfully
self-proving postulate, “Axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are
proved upon our pulses,” which leaves open the question of how an axiom might
be so proved. Milton’s God responds to Satan’s approach to Earth, and his
foreknowledge of Satan’s success in tempting the original pair, with a
preemptive defense of his preordained punishment of Man:

…Whose fault?

Whose but his own? Ingrate! He had
of Me

All he could have. I made him just
and right,

Sufficient to have stood though
free to fall.

Such I created all th’ ethereal
pow’rs

And spirits, both them who stood
and who failed:

Freely they stood who stood and
fell who fell.

Not free, what proof could they
have giv’n sincere

Of true allegiance, constant faith
or love

Where only what they needs must do
appeared,

Not what they would? What praise
could they receive?

What pleasure I from such obedience
paid

When will and reason… had served
necessity,

Not me? (3.96-111)

God is defending himself against the charge that his foreknowledge
of the fall implies that Man’s decision to disobey was borne of something other
than his free will. What choice could there have been if the outcome of Satan’s
temptation was predetermined? If it wasn’t predetermined, how could God know
what the outcome would be in advance? God’s answer—of course I granted humans
free will because otherwise their obedience would mean nothing—only introduces
further doubt. Now we must wonder why God cherishes Man’s obedience so
fervently. Is God hungry for political power? If we conclude he is—and that
conclusion seems eminently warranted—then we find ourselves on the side of
Satan. It’s not so much God’s foreknowledge of Man’s fall that undermines human
freedom; it’s God’s insistence on our obedience, under threat of God’s terrible
punishment.

Milton
faces a still greater challenge in his attempt to justify God’s ways “upon our
pulses” when it comes to the fallout of Man’s original act of disobedience. The
Son argues on behalf of Man, pointing out that the original sin was brought
about through temptation. If God responds by turning against Man, then Satan
wins. The Son thus argues that God must do something to thwart Satan: “Or shall
the Adversary thus obtain/ His end and frustrate Thine?” (3.156-7). Before
laying out his plan for Man’s redemption, God explains why punishment is
necessary:

…Man
disobeying

Disloyal
breaks his fealty and sins

Against the
high supremacy of Heav’n,

Affecting
godhead, and so, losing all,

To expiate
his treason hath naught left

But to
destruction sacred and devote

He with his
whole posterity must die. (3. 203-9)

The potential contradiction between foreknowledge and free
choice may be abstruse enough for Milton’s character to convincingly discount:
“If I foreknew/ Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault/ Which had no
less proved certain unforeknown” (3.116-9). There is another contradiction,
however, that Milton neglects to take on. If Man is “Sufficient to have stood
though free to fall,” then God must justify his decision to punish the “whole
posterity” as opposed to the individuals who choose to disobey. The Son agrees
to redeem all of humanity for the offense committed by the original pair. His
knowledge that every last human will disobey may not be logically incompatible
with their freedom to choose; if every last human does disobey, however, the
case for that freedom is severely undermined. The axiom of collective guilt
precludes the axiom of freedom of choice both logically and upon our pulses.

In
characterizing disobedience as a sin worthy of severe punishment—banishment
from paradise, shame, toil, death—an offense he can generously expiate for Man
by sacrificing the (his) Son, God seems to be justifying his dominion by pronouncing
disobedience to him evil, allowing him to claim that Man’s evil made it
necessary for him to suffer a profound loss, the death of his offspring. In
place of a justification for his rule, then, God resorts to a simple guilt
trip.

Man shall
not quite be lost but saved who will,

Yet not of
will in him but grace in me

Freely
vouchsafed. Once more I will renew

His lapsed
pow’rs though forfeit and enthralled

By sin to
foul exorbitant desires.

Upheld by
me, yet once more he shall stand

On even
ground against his mortal foe,

By me
upheld that he may know how frail

His fall’n
condition is and to me owe

All his
deliv’rance, and to none but me. (3.173-83)

Having decided to take on the burden of repairing the damage
wrought by Man’s disobedience to him, God explains his plan:

Die he or
justice must, unless for him

Some other as
able and as willing pay

The rigid
satisfaction, death for death. (3.210-3)

He then asks for a volunteer. In an echo of an earlier
episode in the poem which has Satan asking for a volunteer to leave hell on a
mission of exploration, there is a moment of hesitation before the Son offers
himself up to die on Man’s behalf.

…On Me let
thine anger fall.

Account Me
Man. I for his sake will leave

Thy bosom
and this glory next to Thee

Freely put
off and for him lastly die

Well
pleased. On Me let Death wreck all his rage! (3.37-42)

This great sacrifice, which is supposed to be the basis of
the Son’s privileged status over the angels, is immediately undermined because
he knows he won’t stay dead for long: “Yet that debt paid/ Thou wilt not leave
me in the loathsome grave” (246-7). The Son will only die momentarily. This
sacrifice doesn’t stack up well against the real risks and sacrifices made by
Satan.

All the
poetry about obedience and freedom and debt never takes on the central questionSatan’s rebellion forces readers to ponder: Does God deserve our obedience? Or
are the labels of good and evil applied arbitrarily? The original pair was
forbidden from eating from the Tree of Knowledge—could they possibly have been
right to contravene the interdiction? Since it is God being discussed, however,
the assumption that his dominion requires no justification, that it is instead
simply in the nature of things, might prevail among some readers, as it does
for the angels who refuse to join Satan’s rebellion. The angels, after all, owe
their very existence to God, as Abdiel insists to Satan. Who, then, are any of
them to question his authority? This argument sets the stage for Satan’s remarkable
rebuttal:

…Strange
point and new!

Doctrine which we would know whence
learnt: who saw

When this creation was? Remember’st
thou

Thy making while the Maker gave
thee being?

We know no time when we were not as
now,

Know none before us, self-begot,
self-raised

By our own quick’ning power…

Our puissance is our own. Our own
right hand

Shall teach us highest deeds by
proof to try

Who is our equal. (5.855-66)

Just as a pharaoh could claim credit for all the monuments
and infrastructure he had commissioned the construction of, any king or
dictator might try to convince his subjects that his deeds far exceed what he
is truly capable of. If there’s no record and no witness—or if the records have
been doctored and the witnesses silenced—the subjects have to take the king’s
word for it.

That God’s
dominion depends on some natural order, which he himself presumably put in
place, makes his tendency to protect knowledge deeply suspicious. Even the
angels ultimately have to take God’s claims to have created the universe and
them along with it solely on faith. Because that same unquestioning faith is
precisely what Satan and the readers of Paradise
Lost are seeking a justification for, they could be forgiven for finding
the answer tautological and unsatisfying. It is the Tree of Knowledge of Good
and Evil that Adam and Eve are forbidden to eat fruit from. When Adam, after
hearing Raphael’s recounting of the war in heaven, asks the angel how the earth
was created, he does receive an answer, but only after a suspicious preamble:

…such commission from above

I have
received to answer thy desire

Of
knowledge with bounds. Beyond abstain

To ask nor
let thine own inventions hope

Things not
revealed which the invisible King

Only
omniscient hath suppressed in night,

To none
communicable in Earth or Heaven:

Enough is
left besides to search and know. (7.118-125)

Raphael goes on to compare knowledge to food, suggesting that
excessively indulging curiosity is unhealthy. This proscription of knowledge
reminded Shelley of the Prometheus myth. It might remind modern readers of The Wizard of Oz—“Pay no attention to
that man behind the curtain”—or to the space monkeys in Fight Club, who repeatedly remind us that “The first rule of
Project Mayhem is, you do not ask questions.” It may also resonate with news
about dictators in Asia or the Middle East trying to desperately to keep social
media outlets from spreading word of their atrocities.

Like the
protesters of the Arab Spring, Satan is putting himself at great risk by
challenging God’s authority. If God’s dominion over Man and the angels is
evidence not of his benevolence but of his supreme selfishness, then Satan’srebellion becomes an attempt at altruistic punishment. The extrapolation from
economic experiments like the ultimatum and dictator games to efforts to topple
dictators may seem like a stretch, especially if humans are predisposed to
forming and accepting positions in hierarchies, as a casual survey of virtually
any modern organization suggests is the case.

Organized institutions, however,
are a recent development in terms of human evolution. The English missionary
Lucas Bridges wrote about his experiences with the Ona foragers in Tierra del
Fuego in his 1948 book Uttermost Part of
the Earth, and he expresses his amusement at his fellow outsiders’
befuddlement when they learn about the Ona’s political dynamics:

A certain scientist visited our
part of the world and, in answer to his inquiries on this matter, I told him
that the Ona had no chieftains, as we understand the word. Seeing that he did
not believe me, I summoned Kankoat, who by that time spoke some Spanish. When
the visitor repeated his question, Kankoat, too polite to answer in the
negative, said: “Yes, senor, we, the Ona, have many chiefs. The men are all
captains and all the women are sailors” (quoted in Boehm 62).

At least among Ona men, it seems there was no clear
hierarchy. The anthropologist Richard Lee discovered a similar dynamic
operating among the !Kung foragers of the Kalahari. In order to ensure that no
one in the group can attain an elevated status which would allow him to
dominate the others, several leveling mechanisms are in place. Lee quotes one
of his informants:

When a young man kills much meat,
he comes to think of himself as a chief or a big man, and he thinks of the rest
of us as his servants or inferiors. We can’t accept this. We refuse one who
boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody. So we always speak
of his meat as worthless. In this way we cool his heart and make him gentle.
(quoted in Boehm 45)

These examples of egalitarianism among nomadic foragers are
part of anthropologist Christopher Boehm’s survey of every known group of
hunter-gatherers. His central finding is that “A distinctively egalitarian
political style is highly predictable wherever people live in small, locally
autonomous social and economic groups” (35-36). This finding bears on any
discussion of human evolution and human nature because small groups like these
constituted the whole of humanity for all but what amounts to the final
instants of geological time.